Full report
Published: 7 September 2022

Annual Report 2021-2022

 Centres

• Centre for Regional and Global Cooperation

| Børge Brende, President of the Managing Board

“The Centre for Regional and Global Cooperation is at the heart of the World Economic Forum’s work, convening leaders to deliver cooperative approaches that solve critical global challenges.”

—Børge Brende, President of the Managing Board

Global context

The war in Ukraine and growing geopolitical turbulence have lent new urgency to the Forum’s mission of advancing multistakeholder and multilateral cooperation. As the rules-based global system faces the most significant challenge in the post-war era, it is incumbent on actors to work with a common purpose to strengthen the underlying mechanisms of regional and global collaboration while addressing immediate and long-standing priorities.

Engagement

Housing nine regional and community teams alongside the Platform for Shaping the Future of Trade and Investment, the Centre facilitates impact-oriented dialogue and builds communities of purpose.

Impact

Through this work, the Centre generates actionable insights and delivers collaborative efforts that help stakeholders not just navigate but also shape today’s uncertain environment.

Delivering impact through purpose driven dialogue

In March 2022, the Centre convened a CEO Dialogue: Responding to the Geopolitical Crisis in Europe that brought together over 100 CEOs as well as leading experts to identify steps business can take to address the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and geopolitical challenges in Europe. The Centre also hosted a special Agenda Dialogue: The Humanitarian Crisis in Ukraine and Its Global Impacts to offer audiences ways to assist refugees and displaced persons.

The Centre assembled the Breaking the Impasse community, which now counts more than 200 Israeli and Palestinian business leaders working together to advocate for a two-state solution. In October 2021, members of the group met with Hady Amr, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israel-Palestinian Affairs, to discuss how they could advance dialogue on a solution. In February 2022, members met with Ruth Porat, Senior Vice-President and Chief Financial Officer of Google, after which the company pledged $10 million in support of the Palestinian technology ecosystem.

The Centre continued to serve as a platform for strengthening economic growth and stability in the Western Balkans. Leaders from business and government met at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2022 for a Diplomacy Dialogue on the Western Balkans to identify steps to boost the region’s resilience and secure ties with key partners at a time of heightened geopolitical risk.

A critical foundation of the Centre’s work are its Country Strategy Dialogues – private conversations between business leaders and top government officials, including heads of state and government. These sessions serve as a crucial tool for identifying the measures needed to attract investment opportunity, build competitiveness and accelerate growth. Dialogues were held this year with leadership from China, Colombia, the European Commission, Indonesia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Spain, the United States and Viet Nam.

The Centre also convenes Global and Regional Action Groups, each comprised of approximately 50 to 70 leaders from business and government, which meet quarterly to explore and present strategies for strengthening cooperative structures and advancing shared priorities. Their activities this year include:

– The Global Action Group identified options for advancing cooperative efforts within a more competitive geopolitical context. Members presented insights during The Davos Agenda in January 2022, focusing on pathways towards building a more equitable and sustainable global economy.

– The Regional Action Group for Africa focused on advancing economic and energy priorities on the continent, releasing white papers on “Attracting Investment and Accelerating Fourth Industrial Revolution Adoption in Africa” and on “Financing the Future of Energy”.

– The Regional Action Group for ASEAN supported priority areas for the implementation of the ASEAN Comprehensive Recovery Framework. With the historic signing of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and strides made towards enhancing regional cooperation on the digital economy, the group contributed to finding ways to strengthen supply chain resilience and expand digital collaboration across ASEAN.

– The Regional Action Group for Europe and Eurasia examined paths towards long-term competitiveness in the region. Members of the CEO Action Group for the European Green Deal continued to deliver concrete results to tackle carbon emissions through tailored lighthouse projects, such as the EU Carbon + Farming Coalition.

– The Regional Action Group for Latin America convened members to chart effective responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and joint actions for rebuilding and recovery efforts.

– The Regional Action Group for the Middle East and North Africa facilitated peer exchanges on energy, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and sustainable investment strategies.

– The Regional Action Group for South Asia convened regional leaders and global experts for action oriented discussions on South Asia’s economic outlook and to develop a collaborative roadmap for the region’s green transition.

“The Annual Meeting in Davos is all about crafting a better future together.”

—Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission

Delivering impact through insight

The Centre delivers public-facing special addresses and dialogues as well as reports and analytical content that elevate public discourse on the most crucial issues facing the world today. In January 2022, The Davos Agenda featured special addresses and remarks by 13 heads of state or representatives. A virtual dialogue was held also with the presidents of Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala and Peru, and the President of the InterAmerican Development Bank.

In July 2021, the Global Future Councils on Geopolitics and on the Korean Peninsula partnered with Chatham House to convene a dialogue on shaping sustainable security on the peninsula.

In collaboration with Kearney and Observer Research Foundation, the Centre prepared “Mission 2070: A Green New Deal for a Net Zero India”, a sectoral multistakeholder roadmap for India to accelerate decarbonization, and laid foundations for the upcoming India CEO Climate Action Leaders group.

“If we strengthen our collaboration on this critical issue while staying true to our values of equity, inclusivity and science, we’ll lead our world towards a clean energy future.”

—John Kerry, US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate

Based on a joint survey with Sea Ltd of close to 90,000 respondents in ASEAN, the Forum published the ASEAN Digital Generation Report: Pathway to ASEAN’s Inclusive Digital Transformation and Recovery, examining the impact of the pandemic in ASEAN countries and exploring the benefits, remaining challenges and outlook for inclusive digitalization.

The first in an insight report series, the Lighthouse Action on Social Justice through Stakeholder Inclusion publication featured nine corporate engagement case studies that show ways businesses are advancing social justice and equity.

In step with pending EU corporate human rights due diligence legislation, the Global Future Council on Human Rights launched a set of resources to guide business leaders and corporate boards on how to protect human rights and learn from affected stakeholders.

Delivering trade and investment impact

The Platform for Shaping the Future of Trade and Investment brings together a community of over 100 leading global companies with trade and investment officials to address the challenges and opportunities for resilient, sustainable and inclusive trade. Through a programme of over 50 gatherings, members of the community used the platform to advance the following four priorities.

– Promoting open and stable commerce
The community delivered a call to action signed by 30 CEOs and chairpersons from five continents urging world leaders to re-engage on trade reform, because an underlying cause of trade tensions remains differences among governments on how international rules should guide state intervention in economies at different stages of development. It published a white paper entitled “Industrial Policy and International Competition” on the spillovers of industrial policy that lays out priority areas for action across subsidies, state-ownership, government procurement, trade remedies and investment screening.

– Supporting sustainable and equitable value chains
Members of the community drafted a paper that presented a revised approach to “International Trade and Economic Justice”. Recognizing that women have been disproportionately affected by the economic impact of the pandemic, the platform also served to present an analysis on how trade can support a more gender-equal recovery. Additionally, in support of a new global intergovernmental process on sustainable trade that was launched in December, a white paper was released in partnership with Clifford Chance on “Delivering a Climate Trade Agenda: Industry Insights” on how trade can be more supportive of climate action.

– Facilitating the flow of goods, services and investment
A central focus of the platform remained helping to facilitate growth by making trade and investment simpler and easier. The Global Alliance for Trade Facilitation has 32 country projects that are completed or under way. Half of the projects are in Africa and all mainstream gender and SME priorities based on newly developed best practices. Through the Global Investment Policy and Practice initiative, concrete investment facilitation reforms were delivered in five countries with deep private-sector involvement, and substantial input was provided towards a 100-country plurilateral agreement on investment facilitation for development. The goal of a World Investment for Development Alliance was established with leading international organizations and a funded effort was launched to ameliorate digital foreign direct investment.

– Growing cross-border digital business
To shape global and regional data-flow governance dialogues, the platform released white papers on “Digital Trade in Services and Taxation” and “Digital Currency Governance”. It also launched a partnership with the World Trade Organization that focuses on the impact of emerging technologies on trade policy.

Advancing the humanitarian agenda

At the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2022, the Forum launched a Resilience Consortium, a high-level leadership effort to develop a common resilience framework and coordinated resilience agenda by January 2023. The Forum’s Humanitarian Agenda brought key stakeholders from governments, civil society, international organizations and corporates as well as investors together to discuss expanding solutions that strengthen the self-reliance and resilience of the most vulnerable communities.

With support from the IKEA Foundation, the Humanitarian and Resilience Investing Initiative expanded its efforts to catalyse private capital in fragile markets and strengthen organizational capacity to unlock new sources of financing. The Global Future Council on the New Agenda for Fragility and Resilience published guidelines for complementary action in fragile contexts to showcase how public and private actors can work in concert to better meet the needs of communities in crisis.

In addition, the Centre worked to bring 281 public figures to the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2022 in Davos-Klosters, 44 of whom were heads of state and government. Over the course of the year, the Centre convened 16 Regional and Global Action Group meetings and nine Country Strategy Dialogues, while hosting eight Global Future Councils. Over 120 civil society organizations directly partnered with the Forum.

Raising climate ambition

To help raise global climate action and ambition, the Forum partnered with the United Kingdom’s COP26 Unit in the lead up to the climate conference and helped launch the First Movers Coalition at COP26 with US President Joe Biden and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry. The coalition is jump-starting demand for clean technologies in supply chains.

As the Middle East prepares to host the next two Conferences of the Parties in Egypt and the UAE, the Forum announced a partnership with Egypt to support its efforts around COP27 and is preparing to enter a similar partnership with the UAE. The Forum will help facilitate public-private dialogue and will rally the private sector to contribute effectively to these two events.

• Centre for Industry Transformation

| Jeremy Jurgens, Managing Director

The Centre for Industry Transformation helps leaders navigate competing priorities and pressures to deliver on both growth and the transition to more sustainable, inclusive and equitable societies. Its platforms drive value and impact through three pillars:

Insight: Actionable foresight, analysis and real-time perspectives to inform decision-making

Interaction: Collaboration between the most relevant peers outside their traditional networks

Impact: Catalytic support to galvanize diverse leaders and action towards shared goals

In the past year, the platforms have welcomed additional Partners, seen deeper engagement and responded to a greater number of requests for collaboration than in previous years.

Global context

The waves of COVID-19 pandemic resurgence and response have accelerated digital transformation and technology adoption, caused widespread supply chain blockages, increased ESG expectations, and transformed many sectors through new workplace planning and talent management.

These challenges and others notwithstanding, industry leaders also have unprecedented opportunities. Businesses are the most trusted institutions in society and, for those that can address changing behaviours, demand is growing. Employees and consumers are increasingly motivated by purpose rather than prestige and are willing to emotionally invest in the businesses they believe in.

The rapid adoption of such technologies as artificial intelligence and machine learning, 5G networks, cloud computing, the internet of things and edge computing offers the potential for new revenue streams. This in turn can lead to improved environmental, social and governance outcomes. At the same time, biotech, space, quantum technologies and the metaverse are all increasingly being integrated into real world applications for the benefit of society and consumer markets.

In this context, industry leaders can and are building businesses that are agile, resilient, tech enabled, people-centric and planet-friendly to deliver strong returns and play a material role in addressing global challenges. To help them achieve their goals, leaders can tap into new networks to build partnerships with companies outside their traditional siloes, collaborate with civil society representatives and experts, and develop sustained, trusted relationships with policy-makers.

Engagement

The Centre engages 1,200 of the world’s largest and most innovative companies in efforts to shape the future of industry ecosystems. Each of the 10 Industry Transformation Platforms incorporates the most relevant businesses, innovators and policymakers to address systems-level challenges and opportunities. Industry-specific CEO communities remain at the heart of each platform.

In 2021-2022, the Centre developed three key areas:

– Streamlined and strengthened the value proposition and product offerings for innovative and high-growth companies

– Initiated a revision of the Centres for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network to facilitate greater interaction between national policy and innovation ecosystems with key industries

– Replicated the successful CEO communities, with the creation of nine cross-industry C-level title (CxO) communities that immediately became popular with Partners, such as the Chief Digital Officer and the Chief Operating, Supply Chain and Procurement Officer communities

Impact

Throughout the Centre’s activities, three clear themes emerged as core to the industry transformation agenda in all sectors: people, planet and technology for good. The main achievements of the last year include:

Industry transformations that deliver for people

– The Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative brings new cooperative energy and global vision to the fight against Alzheimer’s disease. Launched in 2021, the Collaborative made progress in bringing together a cohort of 1 million people living with Alzheimer’s, linking a network of 90 clinical trial sites as part of a global, trial-ready system for developing and testing new therapies, and investing to boost health-system preparedness through innovative solutions.

– UNICEF and members of the World Economic Forum Supply Chain & Transport Industry Action Group developed a charter to support the inclusive and safe distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, which contributed to the delivery by UNICEF-COVAX of more than 1 billion vaccines to vulnerable communities primarily in low- and middle-income countries.

– The New Frontiers of Nutrition initiative partnered with over 40 organizations to markedly improve the availability, access and consumer adoption of nutritious choices in order to strengthen the physical and mental health of individuals. Guided by research in behavioural science, the community placed the awareness of good nutrition higher on the global agenda and identified market-led innovation pathways to cement nutrition as a cornerstone of human resilience.

– The EDISON Alliance aims to ensure that every person can affordably participate in the digital economy, focusing on financial inclusion, health and education. The alliance launched the “Guidebook to Digital Inclusion Bond Financing” and the 1 Billion Lives Challenge to bring new services to 1 billion people through commercially sustainable partnerships by 2025. Commitments, with investments and programmes to support them, reached the halfway mark in just nine months.

– A first-of-its-kind Audience Representation Index developed in collaboration with Accenture, Ipsos and Nielsen provided a benchmark for how well consumers see themselves represented in film and TV, gaming, news and magazines, and sport. The World Economic Forum Power of Media Taskforce on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, with its mission to improve measurement, accountability and transparency, continued to collaborate with the industry to strengthen the index framework and explore opportunities to improve diversity and representation in each media sector.

Industry transformations that deliver for the planet

– The Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics aim for consistent and comparable disclosure on environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors. More than 160 global Forum Partner companies have committed to ESG disclosure, with over 60 having done so, backed by the skills and competencies of a community of 300 ESG practitioners. (See the “Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics” box.) The initiative catalysed the establishment of the International Sustainability Standards Board, mandated to create global standards with the endorsement of over 40 governments and jurisdictions.

– The Clean Skies for Tomorrow Coalition amplified collaboration in the aviation industry. Established by eight founding champions, the coalition engaged over 200 organizations in the aviation, energy and finance sectors as well as corporate travellers to promote a net-zero pathway for the industry.

– The Low-Carbon Emitting Technologies (LCET) initiative, comprised of major chemical-sector companies, established the industry’s first CEO-led coalition for the transformation to a net-zero and circular future. By establishing a project development company, the LCET initiative moved to the critical implementation stage, focusing on technological innovation in conjunction with industry partnerships in order to promote the collaborative implementation of low-carbon technologies.

– The Transitioning Industrial Clusters towards Net Zero initiative was launched at COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021, in collaboration with Accenture and the Electric Power Research Institute. This global movement seeks to accelerate the transformation of over 100 industrial clusters globally needed for net-zero emissions, while delivering on jobs, industrial competitiveness and economic growth. Four global clusters from the United Kingdom, Spain and Australia joined the initiative with a total emission reduction commitment equivalent to the emissions of Denmark (approximately 30 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent).

“By working together, we will continue to provide the vital social and economic benefits of long-haul air travel, while delivering a low-carbon future and preserving our planet for generations to come.”

—Shai Weiss, Chief Executive Officer, Virgin Atlantic Airways

– With only 2% of plastic packaging effectively recycled, the Consumers Beyond Waste initiative is driving a systemic shift from single-use items to a reuse model that eliminates plastic waste and reduces carbon emissions. The project helped to accelerate new reuse solutions at the country level by engaging such innovators as Loop and Algramo. As such, reuse solutions in the food, personal and home care categories progressed in Chile, France, Indonesia, Japan and the United States, among others, in partnership with leading industry retailers and manufacturers.

Financing the Transition to a Net Zero Future engaged more than 50 financial institutions to develop financing blueprints and a set of policy recommendations for breakthrough decarbonization technologies to enable the net-zero transition of the steel, aviation and shipping industries.

Source: GETTY/WILLIAM TAUFIC

Industry transformations through technology

– Through the Technology, Innovation and Systemic Risk project, over 100 financial services firms and public-sector leaders collaborated on research that identified short- and long-term risks stemming from the increased use of technology in financial services. The initiative also outlined plausible mitigation strategies.

– A total of 120 senior cybersecurity leaders contributed insights to the flagship Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2022 report that seeks to advance the debate on cyber-risk and to continue elevating cybersecurity from a technical topic to a strategic imperative. The report reached over 150,000 readers and was featured in over 230 international media outlets.

– The Partnership against Cybercrime strives to amplify public-private cooperation to combat cybercrime and overcome the existing barriers to cooperation. The community launched the Cybercrime Atlas initiative, a joint effort by leading experts to map the cybercrime landscape to inform decision-makers and support collaborative efforts to disrupt cybercrime.

– The Digital Transformation for Long-term Growth initiative convenes over 120 organizations from a multitude of sectors for peer knowledge exchange and collaboration on pre-competitive transformation frameworks. In addition to bimonthly exchanges, it established the Chief Digital Officer community.

– The global deployment of the Smart Industry Readiness Index (SIRI), an assessment and benchmarking tool for digital maturity in manufacturing, was accelerated and expanded. It was originally launched and piloted in Singapore, with approximately 600 companies from 30 countries undertaking the assessment. A new independent and not-for-profit organization, the International Centre for Industrial Transformation, was established to further scale the Index’s adoption at the global level.

– The Forum established a new global Centre for Urban Transformation and the Urban Transformation Summit to advance public-private collaboration and collective action in cities across the globe. The inaugural Summit in December 2021 brought together more than 350 mayors, business executives, community leaders and experts in urban development from 38 countries in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia.

The increased Partner focus on impact-oriented activities resulted in greater concentration on high-impact, multi-sector collaborations. Every platform now hosts at least one flagship initiative and most operate across multiple Forum communities, creating greater overall alignment and coherence. A priority for the year ahead will be to further strengthen the strategic alignment in order to meet community-driven needs and agendas within a shared, flexible framework.

In parallel, constituents’ increased appetite for peer exchange in the face of rapid change both strengthened the core peer communities and led to the establishment of new CxO communities. The Centre will continue to invest in them as core vehicles for value exchange and as a means to increase the breadth of relationships with Partners.

Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics

International Business Council

The International Business Council (IBC) is a group of 120 leading CEOs from international companies who are champions of the principles of stakeholder capitalism. Chaired by Brian Moynihan, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Bank of America, the IBC brings global and cross-industry CEOs together to exchange views on good corporate practice, to prioritize and drive action on key and timely global issues, and to align their corporate values and strategies to serve society better.

Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics

One exemplary effort is the Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics that were disseminated by the World Economic Forum in 2019 to align corporate values and strategies with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Faced with a proliferation of voluntary standards of measurement that limited the ability of companies, investors and stakeholders to keep firms accountable for their vision and match them with their actions, the IBC created and promoted the adoption of a set of common Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics that allow the consistent and comparable measurement of the effects of a business on its wider group of stakeholders.

The metrics were identified in conjunction with the main professional services firms – Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC – and led to collaboration with the world’s most prominent international standard setter for financial accounting to develop common, international standards on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues.

To date, over 160 global companies from the Forum’s partnership community have committed to embedding the Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics into their reporting materials. This constitutes a strong signal by an international group of prominent issuers for the need to advocate for the global alignment and convergence of ESG reporting systems in capital markets. Over 60 companies published their annual reporting materials incorporating the Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics in the past year. The Forum itself is one such organization. Its performance on ESG-related aspects is published in this Annual Report.

Community of ESG Practitioners

To build capacity and skills and raise the bar in the ever-evolving area of ESG reporting, the Forum created a global community of over 300 ESG practitioners representing the companies committed to regularly taking part in peer exchange, reviewing best practices, and engaging in collective dialogue with international and jurisdictional regulators and standard setters.

Mobilizing a community of companies that voluntarily report on their ESG performance through a set of common metrics is a step towards the convergence, simplification and standardization of the sustainability reporting ecosystem. The group represents an influential constituency that has engaged with policy-makers, financial market regulatory authorities and international standard setters to get a consensus on forming a body that would oversee the development of international standards for all capital markets.

The future: International Standards for Sustainability

Building on the momentum of this initiative, and in recognition of the systemic relevance of the Forum’s private-sector coalition, the project team participated as a member of the Technical Readiness Working Group of the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation, which laid the basis for the establishment of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), whose mandate is to create international standards for sustainability disclosures.

Launched in November 2021 at COP26 and endorsed by over 40 governments and jurisdictions, the ISSB will continue to cooperate with the Forum and its private-sector coalition as it develops international sustainability disclosure standards for all financial markets. In addition to supporting the ISSB in its mission, the Forum and its platforms enable the coalition to hold a regular dialogue with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group, and other regulators and standard setters to test and contribute to shaping upcoming regulations on mandatory sustainability reporting to promote a harmonized approach among jurisdictions.

• Centre for Nature and Climate

| Gim Huay Neo, Managing Director

The Centre for Nature and Climate seeks to safeguard the global commons, by driving climate action, developing a nature positive economy, regenerating food, water and ocean systems as well as improving resource management and preventing pollution.

The Centre develops multistakeholder partnerships to accelerate action and scale solutions, and supports policy for a net-zero and nature positive transformation. It provides a trusted and vibrant platform to progress towards the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The Centre adopts a three-pronged approach across industry and geographies:

– Building awareness and thought leadership

– Creating connections and catalysing change

– Incubating public-private initiatives and scaling innovation

Global context

The global commons are under severe strain, with systems at serious risks of collapse, threatening societies, economies and the planet. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (February 2022) states that global warming is likely to reach 1.5° C between 2030 and 2052, at its current rate of increase. This will displace millions of people, impact food and water security, disrupt supply chains, cripple the global economy, and threaten the health and livelihoods of people globally.

Environmental risks continued to dominate this year’s Global Risks Report 2022, with climate action failure, extreme weather events, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse as the top risks identified for the immediate and long term. The World Economic Forum’s New Nature Economy Report states that $44 trillion of economic value generation – over half the world’s total GDP – is dependent on nature, calling for an immediate reverse in nature loss by adopting sustainable practices.

The need for action and global cooperation is more urgent than ever before. But crisis can be turned into opportunity; it is possible to forge a sense of collective purpose, build trust and understanding, and promote global partnerships for a more sustainable, inclusive and resilient world that will serve current and all future generations well.

Everyone must act now, act fast and act at scale to fast track adaptation and transition in energy use, resource management as well as food, water and ocean systems. Investments in climate solutions would yield massive opportunities, and a nature-positive transition could generate up to $10.1 trillion in annual business value and create 395 million jobs by 2030.

Engagement

The Centre for Nature and Climate builds communities and connects corporate CEOs, heads of state, thought leaders, academics, public figures, cultural leaders and technology disruptors to champion and co-create action-based partnerships, to unify, amplify and scale its work across sectors and geographies.

Our engagement network includes over 190 Partner companies across 20 industry sectors operating in 13 regions, more than 70 government collaborators from around the world and a portfolio of over 50 international and philanthropic organizations that share our objectives and purpose. The Centre also maintains long-standing partnerships with international organizations and intergovernmental processes, such as the COP26 Presidency and the United Nations General Assembly.

The Centre’s agenda is focused on five interconnected themes:

– Accelerating climate action for net zero

– Fast-tracking towards a nature-positive economy

– Regenerating food, ocean and water systems

– Advancing resource circularity

– Enabling market mechanisms through innovative finance and technology

To help guide and steward the climate and nature agenda, the Centre convenes multiple high-level global leadership groupings, including the Alliance of CEO Climate Leaders, the Champions for Nature community, the Food Stewardship Board and the Friends of Ocean Action network. These Partners meet regularly to shape the strategy and direction of the agenda, share best practices and exchange ideas, and actively support activities through policy advocacy and corporate action, for example by collaborating with the UK Presidency and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on COP26.

Similar partnerships exist at the regional levels to translate global ambition into local action. These include Coalitions for the Amazon Bioeconomy to catalyse forest restoration, and National Plastic Action Partnerships (NPAP) to combat plastic pollution. Through these arrangements, the Centre supports local capability building and ownership, and pilots ideas and solutions that can be scaled and sustained as catalytic forces for change.

“In building the Climate Action Platform’s drumbeat to Glasgow, the Mission Possible Partnership (MPP) drove the conversation of net-zero ambition into action. The MPP is a critical step towards delivering real, tangible commitments to sectoral action in the net-zero industry transition.”

—Nigel Topping, UK High-Level Climate Action Champion, COP26 Climate Champions

Impact

Thanks to the continuous support and commitment of a network of Partners, donors, experts and other key communities, 2021-2022 was another high-impact year, with COP26 as a major catalytic milestone for raising ambition and driving progress for climate action.

Highlighted activities and achievements include:

Accelerating climate action for net-zero

This was a pivotal year for accelerating and scaling action on the climate. At COP26, the Forum partnered closely with the UK Presidency, the UNFCCC HighLevel Champions and other key partners to mobilize action across its communities and networks. What stood out was an unprecedented mobilization of business, citizens, academia and many others to push for bolder outcomes, and to take ownership for action. The UN’s Race to Zero Campaign, which the Forum supported, grew to over 5,000 businesses, 67 regions, over 440 financial institutions, over 1,000 educational institutions and more, all committed to halving emissions between 2020 and 2030. The full COP26 highlights were published. Some high points include:

– The Alliance of CEO Climate Leaders is now the largest CEO-led climate alliance globally. It grew its membership by 40%, comprising 119 CEOs in 27 countries and representing 9 million employees. The chief executives signed an open letter to world leaders in the lead-up to the G7 and COP26 in support of “bold and courageous commitments, policies and actions”.

– Over 35 global businesses launched the First Movers Coalition, a partnership between the World Economic Forum and the office of the US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry. The coalition aggregates the purchasing commitments of members as a demand driver for innovative technologies needed to decarbonize “hard-to-abate” sectors, representing more than a third of global carbon emissions, and are essential to achieving net-zero by 2050. Membership grew to over 50 at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2022.

– The Mission Possible Partnership (MPP) continued to grow and advance its work to accelerate the net-zero transition in seven hard-to-abate sectors, including the launch of its first industry-backed and open-source decarbonization Sector Transition Strategies for aviation, shipping and steel. The MPP aunched a critical set of industry roadmaps and continued to collaborate with the High-Level Champions team.

– The Alliance for Clean Air was launched at COP26 with 10 founding members: Accenture, Bloomberg, Biogen, Google, GoTo, IKEA, Maersk, Mahindra Group, Siemens and Wipro. Together, they tackle the issue of air pollution from a corporate perspective.

Fast-tracking towards a nature-positive economy

The Nature Action Agenda released two reports this year:

– The New Nature Economy Report Part 3 series, Seizing Business Opportunities in China’s Transition Towards a Nature-positive Economy, highlights that a nature-positive economy in China could generate 88 million resilient jobs by 2030.

– The BiodiverCities by 2030: Transforming Cities’ Relationship with Nature report articulates a vision for the cities of the future that places nature at the heart of decision-making and infrastructure investments.

The Tropical Forest Alliance co-chaired the multistakeholder task force for the Forest, Agriculture and Commodity Trade dialogue, which culminated in a joint roadmap and statement by 28 countries at COP26 to reduce commodity-driven deforestation. The alliance also brought together 12 of the world’s biggest agricultural trading and processing companies to issue a joint statement committing to a sectoral roadmap by COP27 for enhancing supply chain actions consistent with a 1.5° C pathway.

The Innovative Finance for the Amazon, Cerrado and Chaco initiative brought eight major financial institutions and agribusiness companies together that committed $3 billion to soy and cattle production that is free of deforestation and land conversion in South America.

1t.org (Trillion Trees initiative) continued to mobilize private-sector ambition and engagement for forests, bringing the total to 33 global and 44 US corporate pledges committed to conserving and restoring 5.7 billion trees. It also catalysed forest restoration in priority regions by supporting Coalitions for the Amazon Bioeconomy and the Great Green Wall in the Sahel, and engaging in partnerships in India and China. A landmark commitment was made by China at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2022 to conserve and plant 70 billion trees (supported by new 1t.org China Action).

100 Million Farmers was recognized as one of the Breakthrough Agendas for Agriculture and Innovation by 40 world leaders.

The Natural Climate Solutions Alliance, convened jointly by the World Economic Forum and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, launched the Natural Climate Solutions Investment Accelerator to mobilize private-sector investment in these solutions, with the aim of removing 1 gigaton of CO2e per year by 2025.

Regenerating food, ocean and water systems

As part of the UN Food Systems Summit in September 2021, the Forum chaired the Innovation Lever of Change, convening a diverse community of nearly 80 public-, private-and social-sector organizations to promote the adoption of a wider, more holistic view of innovation.

The Food Action Alliance identified the EU and four priority country partners, namely India, Colombia, Kenya and Viet Nam, to develop Food Innovation Hubs, under the support of the Government of the Netherlands, through public-private collaboration.

With Friends of Ocean Action, new ocean initiatives this year ranged from the Blue Food Partnership, a unique platform that is catalysing science-based actions towards healthy and sustainable aquatic food value chains, to the Ocean 100 Dialogues, a science-business platform enabling business leaders in the ocean economy to deliver cross-industry action to accelerate sustainable ocean stewardship.

The 2030 Water Resources Group, hosted at the World Bank, is the most mature and successful public-private-civil society partnership on water to date. It reached over 1,000 partners across 14 countries/ states. As an example of its impact, the Accelerator project on strengthening agriculture value chains in India is supporting livelihoods and water security across 8,000 hectares, affecting 10,000 families, conserving an estimated 80 billion litres of water and mobilizing $16 million of investment.

The 50L Home Coalition, pushing the norms of domestic urban water use to address the nexus of water security and energy through its thoughtleadership products, gained new global partners and advanced city pilot options in China, Europe and the US for 2022.

In the context of COVID-19, the Hand Hygiene Market Accelerator, in collaboration with UNICEF, accelerated the flow of critical hand hygiene products to vulnerable locations and people.

A new collaboration with HCL and UpLink was launched at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2022, with $15 million of funding for entrepreneurs who can drive innovation to tackle freshwater crisis.

Advancing resource circularity

Scale360° and the Forum Circular Economy initiative expanded its reach from two countries to 20 in 2021, applying its systemic approach to circular innovation and collaboration to cities, regions and countries around the world. It also launched the Circular Economy for the Net-Zero Industry Transition initiative, partnering with hard-to-abate materials sectors.

The Global Plastic Action Partnership (GPAP) extended its national partnerships to Maharashtra state, India, Nigeria and Pakistan, while the existing Viet Nam partnership was the lead collaborator in the government’s new law on environmental protection, using the GPAP’s roadmap to inform a national climate policy. The Reuse Portal, a global one-stop-shop to enable collective action for reuse, was co-developed and launched by the GPAP, the WWF and the UN Environment Programme, and the GPAP was instrumental in enabling partners in the plastics value chain to agree on cohesive next steps for a plastic pollution treaty at the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-5.2).

“As we work together to seek solutions to our growing global plastic waste problem, the Global Plastic Action Partnership is effectively uniting stakeholders worldwide by creating a framework that drives change by supporting the types of financing and innovations that are needed to reduce plastic pollution in the environment and in our communities.”

—Audrey Choi, Chief Sustainability Officer, Morgan Stanley

Enabling market mechanisms through innovative finance and technology

Enabling market mechanisms through innovative finance and technology To encourage private-sector capital investment in emerging markets, the Sustainable Development Investment Partnership (SDIP) developed solutions to reduce perceived and actual risks across financial and non-financial dimensions through the launch of white paper “Reshaping Risk Mitigation: The Impact of Non-financial Levers”. In Saint Lucia, it created a Country Financing Roadmap to align capital behind development priorities to support a renewable energy pipeline of $80 million, and $12 million in investments for workforce reskilling.

The SDIP also launched the “Principles for Financing a Just and Urgent Energy Transition”, helping to generate alignment between financial institutions and civil society on accountability standards for the design of energy transition financing arrangements.

UpLink, the open innovation platform of the World Economic Forum, has been at the forefront of an entrepreneur revolution, to support positive systemic change for people and the planet. To inspire and uplift entrepreneurs who will pave the way to a net-zero, nature-positive future, UpLink launched 14 innovation challenges, focusing on nature and climate, sourcing innovations from all over the world and selecting a total of 138 new Top Innovators with highly promising solutions. In an effort to scale their work, UpLink is building around them a collaborative ecosystem of investors, experts and partners, and has been dedicated to facilitating visibility, event access and connection opportunities that can unlock their potential. The Impact Report 2021-2022 highlights how the UpLink platform enables these innovations, and showcases the individual and collective impact of Top Innovators – this collective impact is self-declared data which is reported as measured, verified and/or estimated. Over 2021-2022, Top Innovators protected or actively managed over 10 million hectares of natural habitat, restored more than 812,000 hectares, enabled the protection of over 3,000 species or returned them to their original habitats, reduced or prevented more than 2.8 million metric tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, and removed over 895,000 tonnes of waste pollution from terrestrial and aquatic habitats. In addition, Top Innovators focused on nature-based solutions reported the mobilization of $129 million in funding, which will support their expansion.

To conclude, the activities of the Centre for Nature and Climate were made possible with the joint commitment and active support of Forum Partners and many other stakeholders. Despite the COVID pandemic, the Centre hosted more than 90 events convening over 3,000 stakeholders and key champions. Additionally, the Centre launched 53 publications that provided insights and recommendations to support leaders in their strategy and action plans.

The Centre benefited from the contributions of four Hoffmann Fellows and nine Project/Platform Fellows seconded from Partners who worked on the Centre’s climate, circular economy, food, nature-based solutions, ocean, sustainable financing and technology agendas, alongside Forum staff. The Centre also partnered with 35 funders who provided CHF 24.5 million in direct funding for 15 initiatives. These additional funds enabled the Centre to increase and accelerate efforts to generate new insights, convene more meetings and events, and drive more action-based partnerships within regions and countries, as well as to catalyse innovation and test solutions towards environmental challenges. The source of funds was diverse, with 55% via governments, 33% via philanthropic organizations, 7% via academia, 4% via business and 1% via civil society/non-governmental organizations.

• Centre for the New Economy and Society

| Saadia Zahidi, Managing Director

The Centre for the New Economy and Society aims to shape prosperous, resilient and equitable economies and societies that create opportunity for all. It provides leaders with an integrated platform to understand socioeconomic trends and to shape a better future.

The Centre and its Partners create insights, action frameworks and multistakeholder initiatives in five interconnected thematic areas:

– Economic growth, revival and transformation

– Work, wages and job creation

– Education, skills and learning

– Diversity, equity, inclusion and social justice

– Global risks

This work now impacts the lives and livelihoods of millions of people globally, and one of the World Economic Forum’s ambitions is to reach more governments, businesses and individuals with tangible opportunities.

Global context

The past two years saw economies, workplaces and communities ravaged by a global pandemic. That has been followed by the shock of war – a violent conflict and humanitarian catastrophe. Both global shocks have negatively affected the ability of economies to grow and improve living standards and have increased social polarization within countries, disrupted jobs and education, increased the cost of living and, without action, will leave long-lasting repercussions for poverty and inequality within and between countries.

The Centre’s work is ever more vital and to achieve impact, it leverages a plurality of methods to suit the complexity of the present. The approach is underpinned by key insight products, such as reports on gender, jobs and social mobility, as well as data tools to support evidence-based decision-making, keeping a focus on facts over ideology. The Centre develops action frameworks, such as Country Accelerators, that serve as a bridge between global best-in-class ideas and tangible implementation and action in countries and sectors. In addition, the Centre’s leadership alliances and consortia maintain strong links between the public, private and civil society sectors and between diverse countries and industries, proactively combatting silos over the course of the crises.

These impact methods support a growing coalition of leaders and their organizations in their efforts to keep a strong focus on the economic recovery and the urgent human capital investments and market innovations so crucial to future resilience.

Engagement

The Centre’s strategic direction is guided by an Advisory Board, comprised of nearly 30 leaders from business, government and civil society. The board met four times in 2021-2022, focusing its guidance specifically on the economic recovery, building a new inclusive, resilient and sustainable growth agenda, embedding inclusion into the new economy, recovering losses in jobs and education, and leveraging the full power of the Centre to invest in human capital development.

“The work of the Centre for the New Economy and Society has never been more important. Global challenges like the climate emergency, mounting inequality and the war in Ukraine and all of its implications make it increasingly clear that economic and social progress need to be recoupled to create a more sustainable, equitable and just world. We’re delighted to be collaborating with the World Economic Forum to help enable that goal.”

—Robert Moritz, Global Chairman, PwC

Five of the Forum’s C-suite communities expanded their engagement, namely the Chief Economists, Chief Human Resources Officers (CHRO), Chief Learning Officers, Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officers and Chief Risk Officers from nearly 400 organizations. These groups continued to serve as peer learning communities for leaders grappling with similar challenges and to co-create new insights and action frameworks for the public good.

During the year, the Centre hosted several Global Future Councils, expert communities composed of over 100 leading thinkers and practitioners, to guide planning towards 2025 in six key areas: economic growth and recovery; fiscal and monetary policy; work, wages and job creation; education and skills; equity and social justice; and frontier risks. Their work is consolidated in the “Building Back Broader” white paper, a guide to driving greater quality growth and expanding opportunity for all in the economies of tomorrow.

In 2021-2022, nearly 30 new businesses joined as core Partners of the Centre for the New Economy and Society, bringing the total to over 150, indicating the increasing relevance of the socio-economic agenda to the business community. More broadly, across the Centre’s various insight partnerships, action initiatives and leadership alliances and consortia, over 400 businesses were involved, covering a plurality of sectors.

Nearly 30 governments engaged with the Centre through its Country Accelerators model, aimed at fostering innovation, skills, education, jobs and gender parity nationally. During the year, eight new governments joined the Global Accelerator Model with the launch of Accelerators in Cambodia (focusing on skills), Kazakhstan (focusing on gender), South Africa (focusing on education), Bangladesh (focusing on education), Japan (focusing on gender), Mexico (focusing on gender), Saudi Arabia (focusing on innovation) and the United Arab Emirates (focusing on the markets and jobs of tomorrow). In addition, the Government of Finland joined as a trusted Knowledge Partner for education.

Over 30 international organizations, civil society organizations, labour unions and university partners also formed part of the sphere of core engagement with the Centre to shape action and policy change on today’s most critical socio-economic issues.

Philanthropic organizations partner with the Centre and generously provide funding to support crucial work. In 2021-2022, five new funding agreements were signed and/or extended for education, skills, social mobility, and racial and social justice, allowing staff dedicated to specific projects to be hired and supporting the overall advancement of the Centre’s agenda.

Source: REUTERS/FLAVIO LO SCALZO

Impact

The triple disruption of the pandemic’s aftermath, geopolitical change and technological acceleration formed the backdrop to the Centre’s work in 2021-2022, which aimed to address both short- and long-term responses. Select examples of the Centre’s work over the year follow:

Raising awareness and vigilance around new and emerging risks

The 17th edition of The Global Risks Report helped accelerate the identification of global risks so business, government, civil society and individuals gain a greater understanding of short-, mid- and long-term global risks, leading to active support for sustainable risk mitigation strategies. The report indicates that environmental risks have the potential to yield the most damage to people and the planet, followed by societal challenges, such as livelihood crises. “Debt crises” and “geo-economic confrontations” also appear in the top 10 risks by severity over the next 10 years.

Defining “good work” and identifying the jobs of tomorrow

Launched at the Jobs Reset Summit in June 2021, the Good Work Alliance is a global, cross-industry initiative to leverage the individual and collective power of companies towards building a healthy, resilient and equitable future of work. It embeds relevant definitions and standards of what constitutes “good work” across in-person, hybrid and virtual work as well as specific goals that companies commit to pursuing as part of their talent practices. The alliance aims to cover both employees and contingent workers. In May 2022, it launched the Good Work Framework to develop metrics and reporting guidelines for companies wishing to make progress towards a good job economy. The framework has thus far been piloted by 13 organizations globally, representing 1.2 million employees and their related supply chains.

In parallel, the Centre’s white paper, “Jobs of Tomorrow: The Triple Returns of Social Jobs in the Economic Recovery”, found that investing in education, health and care jobs can yield a triple dividend: boosting economic activity, expanding employment opportunities and generating social mobility. New modelling of the US economy suggests that every dollar invested would generate more than a twofold return: investing $1.3 trillion in the social jobs of tomorrow could unlock $3.1 trillion in GDP returns and create 11 million jobs by 2030.

During the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2022, the CHRO community mobilized the Refugee Employment and Employability Initiative. The initiative tested its work in Europe to support Ukrainian refugees and created the basis for system-wide global support from employers to refugees that extends across conflict contexts.

Additionally, the Jobs Consortium, a leading group of CEOs and ministers championing productive employment, growth in the jobs of tomorrow, new standards in the workplace and better wages for all in the economic recovery, was launched at the Annual Meeting 2022.

Source: GETTY/TOMMASO ALTAMURA/EYEEM

“The World Economic Forum Centre for the New Economy and Society has been leading a vital impact-based engagement model to help achieve green, gender-blind and economically inclusive societies. The active engagement and cooperation between governments, the business sector, civil society and international organizations have allowed a deeper understanding of the evolving global issues and enabled the creation of a practical toolkit for job creation and reskilling. The Centre has been a successful platform for working together and restoring trust at a time of unprecedented global transformational change.”

—Rania Al-Mashat, Minister of International Cooperation of Egypt

Mobilizing a reskilling revolution

The Reskilling Revolution initiative aims to provide better education, skills and economic opportunities to 1 billion people by 2030. Over 250 businesses, along with over 20 governments and international organizations as well as leading academic experts, were involved over the last year. By its second anniversary at The Davos Agenda in 2022, the initiative had reached 102 million people with new skills, and the Reskilling Revolution Champions had agreed on the initiative’s 2022-2024 strategy. Among its projects, the Closing the Skills Gap Accelerators model was adopted by 11 countries and the Closing the Education Gap Accelerators model was launched at the Sustainable Development Impact Summit 2021 in September, with South Africa as the founding accelerator and Bangladesh joining during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2022.

Monitoring the global gender gap and accelerating gender parity

The Global Gender Gap Report 2022 highlights both progress towards and backsliding on gender parity within and across countries. The time to closing the global gender gap stood at 136 years in 2021, a one-generation loss compared to 100 years in 2020, due to lost employment in the sectors hardest hit by workforce reductions, the disproportionate burden of care, and the unbalanced pipelines of male and female talent in growing sectors. The report is a widely used reference point for business, civil society, media and policy-makers, including in the Closing the Gender Gap Accelerators, a public-private collaboration model to address economic gender parity, already adopted in 12 economies. In 2021-2022, Ecuador, Kazakhstan, Japan and Mexico adopted the model.

Mobilizing business leadership for racial justice

The Partnering for Racial Justice in Business initiative is a global coalition of organizations and C-suite leaders committed to leveraging their individual and collective power to build equitable and just workplaces for professionals with under-represented racial and ethnic identities. More than 60 leading multinational businesses are operationalizing and coordinating commitments to eradicate racism in the workplace and set new global standards for racial equity in business. They worked together and with public-sector leaders during the year to advocate for inclusive policy change.

Embedding equity and inclusion in the workplace

Launched in March 2022, the Global Parity Alliance is a cross-industry group of companies taking action to accelerate diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) in the workplace and beyond. The alliance seeks to drive better and faster DE&I outcomes, by sharing proven best practices and practical insights on creating equitable work opportunities, promoting supplier diversity and launching inclusive products and services. This year, the alliance worked to share identified DE&I lighthouses publicly and support their widespread adoption.

• Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

| Jeremy Jurgens, Managing Director

The Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution helps leaders anticipate, understand and shape the trajectory of technological change for human-centred outcomes. The Centre develops strategies, frameworks and toolkits for technology governance and digital transformation across 30 initiatives led by 250 stakeholders, in policy areas ranging from ethical artificial intelligence (AI) to autonomous drones. It pilots and iterates its solutions in a fast-growing network of 15 national and subnational Centres.

With a combined staff of 200 technology and policy experts in economies representing 40% of global GDP and 30% of the world population, the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network is well positioned to form the trust and accumulate the expertise required to create solutions that are flexible enough to answer local needs and standardized enough to foster connectivity and interoperability.

Global Context

Emerging technologies, from AI to bioengineering and quantum computing, promise smart solutions to the world’s most pressing problems, but their exponential nature often overwhelms existing institutions and organizations, leaving societies exposed to poorly understood risks and deprived of unprecedented opportunities.

In the wake of escalating geopolitical conflicts, a climate crisis that seems out of control and a global economy rattled by the aftershocks of a historic pandemic, adopting shared principles and safeguards for the use of exponential technologies and their implementation is more important, yet also more complex, than ever before.

An example is quantum computing, one of the most important and rapidly advancing emerging technologies today. Promising dramatically better and faster solutions to complex challenges such as climate change, the technology is likely to disrupt industries, markets and geostrategic capabilities. Quantum computing could be used, for example, to create more efficient battery structures or to reorganize food systems to make them less resource intensive.

As outlined in Quantum Computing Governance Principles, a report of the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s Platform for Shaping the Future of Technology Governance: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, the coherent, cohesive, productive and beneficial use of quantum computing is thus of growing industry and public concern. The report sets the agenda for an ongoing stakeholder discourse between technologists and industrial, political and societal leaders, facilitated by the Centre.

The rapid spread of decarbonization commitments is defining another technology trend, accelerating progress in areas from energy and transportation to food production. Technologies like self-fertilizing synthetic crops, identified by the World Economic Forum as one of the top 10 emerging technologies of 2021 in a report by that same name, hold the promise of greater efficiency and sustainability but their broader ecosystem implications are poorly understood.

Quantum computing and synthetic biology are two new domains in which the Centre started expanding its expertise in the past year. The Centre expects more growth in these area in the near future through impact initiatives and new centres as well as through the support of newly signed Global Innovators and Technology Pioneers, the Centre’s communities of startups and scale-ups at the forefront of technological and business model innovation.

“At NTT, we believe in using technology for good. We also believe that technology should be deployed within the proper ethical and regulatory guidelines to truly be effective. We highly value the World Economic Forum and its Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution as a key resource for the public-private collaboration that is necessary to address topics of policy, governance and trust.”

—Devin Yaung, Senior Vice-President, Group Enterprise IoT Products and Services, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT)

Engagement

The Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution engages over 250 industry leaders, public figures and representatives from academia, civil society and international organizations in its three Platforms: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Blockchain and Digital Assets, and Data Policy.

Source: GETTY/YUICHIRO CHINO

In addition, the Centre works directly with governments at the national and subnational level through its network of 15 Centres for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Staff is composed of 200 technology and policy experts, including over 50 Fellows from government, business and academia who are an integral part of the network and play a key role in designing concepts and frameworks as well as advancing real-world applications.

The Centres for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in Azerbaijan, Brazil, Colombia, Israel, Kazakhstan, Norway, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, South Africa, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates are co-hosted and co-financed by national public and/or private entities. The Centres in India and Japan are co-hosted by the World Economic Forum and their respective governments. The San Francisco Centre is a Forum entity and serves as a catalyst, curator and coordinator for the overall network.

All Centres serve as:

– Trusted spaces for public-private cooperation, dedicated to exercising foresight, breaking silos and co-designing solutions for sectoral and industry transformation

– Mission-driven “do-tanks”, equipped with the mandate, stakeholder communities and technical capabilities to rapidly prototype, iterate and scale-up solutions

– Champions for inclusivity and sustainability, pursuing a human-centric approach to technology adoption to promote shared prosperity within planetary boundaries

The Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution systematically identifies and engages game-changing start-up and scale-up companies. Its Global Innovators community comprises 150 privately owned growth-stage (Series B+) start-ups, and its Technology Pioneers community accepts 100 select early-stage start-ups every year.

The 2022 cohort of Technology Pioneers included a significant increase in the number of companies focused on climate change, with activities in such areas as energy storage, hydrogen, alternative proteins and smart buildings. It also included healthcare companies active in women’s health, value-based healthcare, mental health and tele-health as well as start-ups at the forefront of tools and platforms in the metaverse ecosystem.

Source: GETTY/WESTEND61

Impact

The Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution drives impact by building trust, creating insight and encouraging policy innovation and experimentation. It champions multistakeholder collaboration locally, nationally and globally.

Highlighted achievements of the past year include:

– Three new Centres, in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Serbia, were added to the network, for a total number of 15 in advanced and emerging economies, representing 40% of global GDP and 30% of the global population.

– The Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution expanded its local presence and impact to reach more than 50 cities through the launch and growth of the G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance’s regional networks in Latin America and Asia and the establishment of new urban test beds for local entrepreneurship in eight of the world’s fastest growing cities.

– The Global Innovators community grew to over 150 privately owned growth-stage (Series B+) start-ups with a valuation of more than $30 million.

Creating innovative policy strategy and frameworks

– To develop Turkey’s AI sector, the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Turkey helped advance the country’s first strategic AI plan, with guidance and insights from the existing National AI Strategy peer network.

– The Digital Currency Governance Consortium launched a first-of-its-kind global resource for central bank digital currencies and stablecoins, co-created by over 85 organizations and nearly 200 individual members.

“This law provides the necessary foundation to transform Rwanda into a data-empowered society, by ensuring all critical stakeholders, starting with government institutions, are attaining the gold standard in personal data protection and privacy.”

—Paula Ingabire, Minister of Information Communication Technology and Innovation of Rwanda
Source: GETTY/YOSHIKAZU TSUNO

– As part of the Data for Common Purpose Initiative, the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Japan led the development of new governance models for data marketplace service providers, and the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Colombia prototyped a framework to strengthen trust, consent, valuation and the sharing of data in a data marketplace in the energy sector.

– The Global Coalition for Digital Safety continued its work to tackle harmful content and conduct online. The coalition brought together senior members of governments from Australia, Belgium, Singapore and the United Kingdom with Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, among other companies.

Accelerating sectorial transformation

– The Small and Medium Sized Enterprises Futures Network lowered barriers to the adoption of the industrial internet of things among these enterprises. Piloted in Brazil, the initiative was scaled across Colombia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Turkey.

– Working with the Telangana State Government in India and the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution India, the Platform for Shaping the Future of Technology Governance: Data Policy established a consent-based and data-sharing framework that helps Indian farmers build more efficient supply chains, increase crop yields and improve the effectiveness of markets.

– Following the publication of a paper entitled “Artificial Intelligence for Agriculture Innovation” in March 2021, the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution India launched the Enabling Fourth Industrial Revolution Technologies for the Transformation of Agriculture initiative to help solve agriculture’s three biggest challenges: inclusivity, sustainability and efficiency.

– HUB Ocean helped reduce CO2 emissions from shipping through the development of the Ocean Data Platform. The Shipping Emissions Tracking system helped Partners find the most suitable vessel for the transportation of freight.

Promoting responsible technology-driven solutions

– With support from the Platform for Shaping the Future of Technology Governance: Data Policy, the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Rwanda led the development of a new law on the protection of personal data and privacy with the Rwandan Government. The Centre continued to support the National Cyber Security Authority of Rwanda to implement the law.

– Based on recommendations and guidance from the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Japan, the Japanese Government adopted agile governance as one of the five principles of government digital transformation.

– The Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Israel participated as a key coordinator and developer of the regulatory sandbox in Israel’s National Drone Initiative. Three of eight demonstrations were completed, including the transport of COVID-19 lab samples. The Centre will continue to help formulate aerospace regulatory policies pertaining to the responsible use of drones.

Scaling technology-driven solutions for global challenges

– The Responsible Limits on Facial Recognition Technology framework, led by the Shaping the Future of Technology Governance: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Platform, was adopted by Interpol and mandated in its 190 member countries. The framework continued to be piloted by countries on five continents.

– To support the government procurement of responsible AI systems, the AI Procurement in a Box toolkit was piloted worldwide, including in Bahrain, Japan, the UAE and the US. The Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Brazil published the second iteration of the toolkit after successful pilots in the São Paulo subway system and in the city’s Clinical Hospital.

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